Funny money from Flushing
I like to view us as a pan-New York State blog at times, so I think this falls under our purview:
Alice Rocchio is an office manager at the New York headquarters of the Hess Corp., drives a 1993 Chevy Cavalier and lives in an apartment in Queens, N.Y., with her husband, Pasquale, an Amtrak foreman.
Despite what appears to be a middle-class lifestyle, the couple has written $61,600 in checks to John McCain’s presidential campaign and the Republican National Committee, most of it within days of McCain’s decision to endorse offshore oil drilling.
At a June fundraiser, the Rocchios joined top executives at Hess Corp. — Chairman and Chief Executive Officer John Hess, his wife, Susan, his mother, Norma Hess, and six other officials in giving a total of $313,500 to a joint McCain-RNC fundraising committee, Federal Election Commission records show.
This isn’t the only evidence of strange sources of large sums of McCain money. The Washington Post has a piece this morning about a large number of middle class — and even more strangely, apolitical — people giving thousands of dollars a piece to the McCain campaign via a shady bundler. Republicans are having a lot of trouble raising money this cycle and we can expect a lot of this sort of thing. I’m not suggesting that it’s only Republicans who ever do this sort of thing, but it sure does seem like the media is only interested in campaign finance scandals when Republicans aren’t involved. If this were happening with the Obama campaign, you can bet it would be the top story on ThePage and the subject of multiple Washington Post editorials.
Alice and her friends must be retired Buddhist nuns.
That Budhist temple story sure did get a lot of attention.